atime is a legacy ass-backwards default
That no one dared touching it so far does not make it less stupid
We're making more user-impacting changes with less cause every release
Let's just disable atime asap so more testers check it before F8, and
forget about it

Going through the LKML thread on http://kerneltrap.org/node/14148 I
learnt that Ubuntu has already turned it off, and in principle both
Alan Cox and Ingo Molnar want it to be that way for Fedora 8 too.

Ubuntu doesn't have a decade+ history of putting user-controled settings
under /etc/sysconfig and providing python scripts named
redhat-config-xxx or system-config-xxx to manage them. Their style is
to pretend they know more than you do about how your machine should be
configured. Even if they are right, there is something to be said for
consistency.

+1
Would it make sense to add it as an option to first-boot? Personally
it is something I will try, but I have reservations about enforcing on
everybody.

I have to wonder what they've done with the guy who put all those other
settings under /etc/sysconfig or why he didn't do this one too a long
time ago.